Tuesday, Mar 27, 2018, 3:15 pm

A Record Number of Native Americans Are Running For Office in 2018

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In 2016, Peggy Flanagan became the first Native American woman to address the Democratic National Convention. This year, she is running for lieutenant governor of Minnesota. (Image: Fibonacci Blue / Flickr / hcn.org)

Patricia Roybal Caballero was a freshman lawmaker in New Mexico’s House of Representatives when she walked into a popular Santa Fe restaurant in 2013 for a meeting with some of her colleagues. Roybal Caballero, a community and economic developer of Piro-Manso-Tiwa ancestry, was by then used to dealing with negative perceptions about her race, but what happened next astounded her.

“Before I had a chance to ask for a table, the hostess said, ‘I am sorry, but we’re not taking applications right now,’” Roybal Caballero told me recently.

For that kind of encounter to happen to a lawmaker in the state capital, in a city with so many people of color, was a reminder of the need for her to be a voice for marginalized people. Although there are 6.6 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives in the country, Roybal Caballero is one of only a few dozen Indigenous state lawmakers. That’s a discrepancy worth considering as we head toward 2018 midterm elections.

“If you look at our Indigenous populations in the state of New Mexico, it is the voice of New Mexico,” she says. “We are what represents the best and worst of histories of the state.”

For Roybal Caballero, racial misconceptions and ignored histories don’t stop at local restaurants. In a December speech at a charter school conference, the state’s education secretary, Christopher Ruszkowski, said America was built on “freedom, choice, competition, options, going West, Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny is a thorny 19th-century concept—a justification of the expansion of American colonialism that destroyed countless Indigenous communities and lives—but here it was again, being glorified.

“It was one of those moments I refer to as an educational and teaching moment,” Roybal Caballero says, “which I’m finding these days to be almost every moment, that we are subjected to these kind of references.”

Patricia Roybal Caballero has represented District 13 in New Mexico's House of Representatives since 2013. (Image: hcn.org)

“Four in relation to our population in this country may not be seen as significant through the eyes of power and authority, but through our eyes, we know that through our history that just three or four of us can be resounding,” Roybal Caballero says.

The voices of our people have always lacked a proper platform. We have long been marginalized. We have never had a voice in Congress that reflects us as a people. As Roybal Caballero told me: “Even historically, we have had to be our own organizers. We’ve had to lean back on our own traditions. We’ve had to rely on those in order to strengthen our own presence because we have not had anyone.”